Consider The Equilibrium

A white bank robber in Ohio recently used a “hyper-realistic” mask manufactured by a small Van Nuys company to disguise himself as a black man, prompting police there to mistakenly arrest an African American man for the crimes.

Let me have a stab: we’re out of equilibrium right now because lots of white criminals *should* be buying these masks because they take advantage of current racial profiling by police and lower their own probability of capture.

Once the frequency of mask-ownership rises, however, the police will have to be *less* likely to profile (because so many of the “black” criminals are really white and they’d be wasting their time trying to arrest the actual black people who are innocent). This reduction in racial profiling continues until white criminals are indifferent between buying and not buying a mask.

So, from the perspective of someone who wants more racial harmony, this practice is actually a good thing, because it reduces the information content of apparent race and thus encourages less race-based conditional inferences.

But I would say that as racial information from witnesses becomes less trustworthy due to mask usage, detectives will rely more on past probabilities (biased or otherwise) to search for criminals. Since probability matching is suboptimal, this will lead to far more profiling as detectives will now be justified in pursuing the majority race and dismissing the on-the-ground evidence. As false positives naturally increase, this will create a positive feedback loop for the majority race, further increasing justification of profiling.

@mike: of course all bank robbers have an incentive to wear masks in order to throw the police off the chase. But the trick is that, currently, white people have a strong incentive to wear masks that make them look like black people, whereas black people do not havhe a correspondingly strong incentive.

@mike #2: I’m not sure that I agree with your inference that police would rely more heavily on past profiling data, at least in equilibrium. The thing is, these masks give a stronger incentive for white people to become criminals, and as long as white potential criminals respond to this incentive, the fraction of criminals who are white will rise. So while police departments may rely on historical information out of stubbornness or stupidity, this will not be an equilibrium strategy unless they have a very high cost-of-thinking.